happy easter!

[desecrets]

the irregularly scheduled dropping off the face of dreamwidth got me again, although this time at least i had a pretty good excuse.

life exploded in ways which weren't much fun, so between work, classes and generalised stress i feel like i haven't had time to do anything in my spare time except listen desperately to audiobooks for distraction for the past month and a half. 

that said, my reading stats for this year are on track to be much better than last year. :'D

i read Heated Rivalry back in feb, alternating between audiobook and physical copy, mostly because i was curious and i can get books for cheap through work. the TL;DR of my thoughts on it is that its origins as a fanfic are very noticeable, and in some ways this is a positive, but overall it made it a little lackluster, imo.

i thought it could use more hockey, for one thing. i don't know anything about hockey, but the author does, so it's a strange choice to leave it out. it hollowed out a lot of the impact. the main positive is probably that the smut scenes weren't terribly cringe, but actually quite good. but there's a lot of them, and honestly they got kinda old after a while because see above about impact. why am i supposed to believe these guys start out as these angry competitive rivals if i never see them play? "oh he's an asshole, he's a brutal player" "no he doesn't play dirty, he's just good" - girl, where. show me.

it also means a lot of characterisation is essentially omitted, so although i didn't feel like the protags were totally cardboard cutouts, they did feel underutilised, honestly. there were good bones there, but most of the meat got left off.

then, for some mysterious reason known only to itself, my brain finally decided it was time i started reading Discworld properly, so i've spent march more or less marathoning the Watch novels from Men at Arms through Night Watch and now i'm giving Guards Guards a quick reread before i move onto Thud.

i'm trying to pace myself a smidgen now that i only have two books left; i'm not ready for the Watch series to be over!!